Dancing (kind of) and drifting (ish): Stravinsky, Autechre, The Orb

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IDM is to dance music as Stravinsky is to instrumental music; discuss. Well, not exactly, but it strikes me there’s something of a similarity, particularly in the way that the underlying pulse is fragmented into irregular metres. This is probably why i love IDM (and Stravinsky) so much, although i’m more concerned in my own music to violate the underlying pulse itself (which few composers seem to want to do). For me, Autechre are the paradigm of this, deconstructing rhythm into its component parts and setting up weird, mutated versions that evolve into something else (often even stranger). Untilted—which i was listening to earlier in the car—has to be the IDM album par excellence, with the opening and closing tracks being arguably the best; “LCC” becomes weird and wonderful about 2-and-a-half minutes in; “Sublimit” becomes amazing around six-and-a-half minutes in; but they’re both brilliant throughout.

Over the last couple of days, during some much longer car journeys, i’ve been re-visiting an old classic: The Orb‘s Adventures In The Ultraworld. Back when i was a recalcitrant sixth-former, i used to spend my free periods at the record shop in town, and it was there i heard this album playing, back goodness knows when, and a friend and i bought a copy each. Goodness knows how many years later, i’m not sure how well it’s aged. My composition teacher during my degree told me “one doesn’t finish a composition, one just stops working on it”. While i fundamentally disagree with this, it kind of sums up how the conclusion to each half of this album sounds, dragged out for far too long, structure falling apart at the seams, meandering who knows where for who knows how long. i think when this came out (1991, i just checked), it was probably its novelty that saw it through; certainly, i’d never heard anything quite like it. There’s much about it i still really like, but now, i think something is lost.